Generic X79 mobo

[porina]

 

 

Following on from the recent video Linus did on Chinese X79 mobo, I had another look and saw the price was lower than ever, and got one to play with. I wanted one for a while but it was a bit more than I wanted to pay. To go with it, I picked a Xeon E5 2667 which is Sandy Bridge era, 6 cores at 2.9 base, 3.5 turbo. The attraction of these mobos are claimed support of ECC registered ram (with a Xeon) which I have some spare.

 

Box it came in is the brown one you can see under it. Nothing else inside other than the IO plate and a single SATA cable. Windows 10 seemed to detect everything on mobo and got generic drivers for all. No unknown devices in Device Manager. I haven't looked if more optimal drivers are available yet.

 

Picture above was taken when I was testing it worked at all. I have since changed the ram to DDR3 1333 ECC registered, 4x4GB and it seems to work fine.

 

There are 6 SATA ports. Interesting printing on the mobo, suggesting some are SATA 2.0 or 3.0. In testing of 4 ports so far, I've only seen it transfer to SSD up to around 250GB/s, which looks like SATA 2 speeds (3Gbps). I'm using generic MS drivers at the moment so wonder if Intel ones might help there.

 

An interesting feature I like as a bencher is the inclusion of switches on mobo for start/reset, in lower left corner. There's also post code LEDs and built in speaker. For those of you not so old, these can also give diagnostic beeps, although without documentation it will be anyone's guess what they mean.

 

Please note this isn't a review as such. More a log of working out how it works, or doesn't. So many questions left...